Canto Six The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life As one who between dim receding walls Towards the far gleam of a tunnel's mouth, Hoping for light, walks now with freer pace And feels approach a breath of wider air, So he escaped from that grey anarchy. Into an ineffectual world he came, A purposeless region of arrested birth Where being from non-being fled and dared To live but had no strength long to abide. Above there gleamed a pondering brow of sky Tormented, crossed by wings of doubtful haze Adventuring with a voice of roaming winds And crying for a direction in the void Like blind sou

Canto Three The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Soul's Release A world's desire compelled her mortal birth. One in the front of the immemorial quest, Protagonist of the mysterious play In which the Unknown pursues himself through forms And limits his eternity by the hours And the blind Void struggles to live and see, A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air, Brought down to earth's dumb need her radiant power. His was a spirit that stooped from larger spheres Into our province of ephemeral sight, A colonist from immortality. A pointing beam on earth's uncertain roads, His birth held up a symbol and a

Canto Three The House of the Spirit and the New Creation A mightier task remained than all he had done. To that he turned from which all being comes, A sign attending from the Secrecy Which knows the Truth ungrasped behind our thoughts And guards the world with its all-seeing gaze. In the unapproachable stillness of his soul, Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone, Patient he sat like an incarnate hope Motionless on a pedestal of prayer. A Strength he sought that was not yet on earth, Help from a Power too great for mortal will, The Light of a Truth now only seen afar, A sanction f

Canto Five The Yoga of the King: The Yoga of the Spirit's Freedom and Greatness This knowledge first he had of time-born men. Admitted through a curtain of bright mind That hangs between our thought and absolute sight, He found the occult cave, the mystic door Near to the well of vision in the soul, And entered where the Wings of Glory brood In the sunlit space where all is for ever known. Indifferent to doubt and to belief, Avid of the naked real's single shock He shore the cord of mind that ties the earth

Canto Twelve The Heavens of the Ideal Always the Ideal beckoned from afar. Awakened by the touch of the Unseen, Deserting the boundary of things achieved, Aspired the strong discoverer, tireless Thought, Revealing at each step a luminous world. It left known summits for the unknown peaks: Impassioned, it sought the lone unrealised Truth, It longed for the Light that knows not death and birth. Each stage of the soul's remote ascent was built Into a constant heaven felt always here. At each pace of the journey marvellous A new degree of wonder and of bliss, A new rung formed in Being's mighty stair, A g

PART ONE (Books I–III) Book One The Book of Beginnings Canto One The Symbol Dawn It was the hour before the Gods awake. Across the path of the divine Event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge. Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable, In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse The abysm of the unbodied Infinite; A fathomless zero occupied the world. A power of fallen boundless self awake Between the first and the last Nothingness, Recalling the tenebrous womb from which it came, Turned from the insol

Canto Three The Glory and Fall of Life An uneven broad ascent now lured his feet. Answering a greater Nature's troubled call He crossed the limits of embodied Mind And entered wide obscure disputed fields Where all was doubt and change and nothing sure, A world of search and toil without repose. As one who meets the face of the Unknown, A questioner with none to give reply, Attracted to a problem never solved, Always uncertain of the ground he trod, Always drawn on to an inconstant goal He travelled through a land peopled by doubts In shifting confines on a quaking base. In front h

                         

Canto Four The Secret Knowledge On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights. Our early approaches to the Infinite Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun. What now we see is a shadow of what must come. The earth's uplook to a remote unknown Is a preface only of the epic climb Of human soul from its flat earthly state To the discovery of a greater self And the far gleam of an eternal Light. This world is a beginning and a base Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams; An unborn Power must build reality. A deathbound littleness is not

Canto Nine The Paradise of the Life-Gods Around him shone a great felicitous Day. A lustre of some rapturous Infinite, It held in the splendour of its golden laugh Regions of the heart's happiness set free, Intoxicated with the wine of God, Immersed in light, perpetually divine. A favourite and intimate of the Gods Obeying the divine command to joy, It was the sovereign of its own delight And master of the kingdoms of its force. Assured of the bliss for which all forms were made, Unmoved by fear and grief and the shocks of Fate And unalarmed by the breath of fleeting Time And unbesieged by adver